SAY NO TO WAR WITH IRAN!
SAY NO TO WAR WITH IRAN!
DOWN WITH THE SANCTIONS AND THE DE FACTO MUSLIM BAN!
NO GUNBOAT DIPLOMACY!
The U.S. sanctions and threat of war against Iran come at a time when U.S. imperialism is in global decline and facing an historical defeat at the hands of the new rising great imperialist powers, Russia and China. Iran (and to some extent Iraq) now becomes the focal point of U.S. foreign policy that seeks to break up the Russia/China bloc at its weakest point. This is imperialist geopolitics, the rivalry between two hostile blocs for control of the Middle East as a springboard to West Asia. Russia and China have strengthened their alliance with Turkey, Iran and Qatar. Trump wants to break this alliance by testing how far Russia and China will go to defend Iran, and maintain their interests in MENA. Trump’s working assumption seems to be that the U.S. has the power to apply unilateral sanctions to countries from Russia and China to Iran and Venezuela, and force his rivals to compromise, do separate deals, and weaken their capacity to resist U.S. hegemony.
We have news for him; the terminal crisis of global capitalism is disrupting the status quo so fast that the loyalty of the members of the U.S. Bloc is also being tested. Both Russia and China are moving on their own deals with the EU and some of its members. The fate of the UK if it goes with Brexit will speed up the breakup of Europe, and the weakening NATO and the Atlantic Alliance. But more than that the increasing trade wars between the two blocs is the consequence of the revived Arab Revolution, in particular its development towards armed revolution. When the ruling class look for the revolution they fear, they look to MENA. There are now active fronts not only between members of the two blocs, Syria, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Palestine, Turkey, but both the revolution and counter-revolution are armed. Add to this the mass struggles in Sudan and Algeria where the situation calls for the masses to organize militias and win over the ranks of the armed forces, and we have a volatile pre-revolutionary situation.
Trump’s latest adventure in Iran goes to the heart of this dynamic between revolution and counter-revolution in MENA. It shifts the frame of reference in the ‘war on terror’ to the question of who is for, or against, Iran. In the last analysis, however, the inter-imperialist conflicts are all about regime change to ensure that the semi-colonial masses remain dominated and oppressed, so that the global crisis of falling profits can be resolved by counter-revolution. Yet we are in a period when the bosses’ terminal crisis means they cannot rule in the old way. Nor will workers and peasants tolerate paying for the capitalists’ crisis with their lives and livelihoods. The vital factor that is missing to make it possible to win a proletarian revolution against imperialist counter-revolution, is the creation of a new revolutionary leadership organized as a international party of revolution.
Trump ups the ante now when Russia is saying they’ve run out of credit for Iran. Russia is already experiencing frictions with the realities of the Iranian resettlement of Syria and the Tehran-backed Shiite militias in Syria, where Moscow has invested heavily in Mediterranean naval and air bases, a geopolitical win that is historic from the Russian ruling class’ perspective. Russia remembers Afghanistan and its holy warriors and fears what they may do to Moscow infidels after an Assad victory. Some of yesterday’s Mujahedin are nowadays on one or another of Tehran’s militia payrolls.
Iran is undergoing internal crisis with an upturn in class struggle just when rightist warhawk Bolton gets Trump’s ear. Bolton frankly and loudly calls for regime change, telling the world so in his May 5th speech. What he wants is the return of the monarchy, and he has Giuliani, the President’s mouthpiece, organizing support for the MEK, ostensibly a liberal Islamist republican movement, in New York. In the blink of an eye Pompeo is off to Moscow to try to sell a swap: Trump can acquiesce in Russians in Venezuela, but Russia has to cut the Ayatollah regime loose and forget about making Iran a full member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), the China/Russia alliance. This full membership is Russia’s idea. Washington and any blind man could see how China has been cool to it, and we see China calling upon Iran to respect the Joint Comprehensive Plan Of Action (JCPOA) nuclear treaty. Pompeo can tell Putin Trump’s offer is the way to keep the Arab Spring away from Russia’s border. But even the offer of 120,000 U.S. troops will not look remotely adequate to suppressing an Iranian revolution, and it doesn’t help Pompeo’s sales effort that Bolton is suggesting U.S. security requires regime change.
Congress got a report from Pompeo on May 20th, presumably about this trip as well as whatever is real about new, additional frictions with Iran, but the public hears next to nothing because military and intelligence experts have said all the provocations are on the U.S. side and Iran is simply reacting with understandable self-defense preparations. We have been able to learn that Pompeo and Trump believe Trump already has authorization to attack Iran (euphemistically, to defend Americans and allies) under the 2003 Iraq war force authorization! A war Trump has claimed he opposed! Trump says he doesn’t want war, he wants talks, then Rouhani says a war won’t happen and then we hear Tehran is multiplying its enrichment of nuclear material 400%, followed by another exchange of threats. Two days after Pompeo’s briefing the collision with Iran disappeared from the airwaves, buried with every other concern foreign and domestic as the twin capitalist parties wrestle with whether to start impeachment investigations over Trump’s lawlessness.The U.N. calls on the two countries to cool off, hoping out loud Oman will mediate between them, as Oman has done in the past. A move in Congress to deny Trump Iran war powers has failed.
Into this mess Trump dumps a heated up trade war with China and heaps praise on Hungary’s quasi-fascist Viktor Orban, an anti-Muslim, anti-Semite “illiberal democrat,” in Orban’s own words. Trump says he and Orban are two “controversial” guys defending their countries. Which is to say white nationalism/ whiteness maintenance.[1] Orban is certain not to object to greater U.S. sanctions on Iran, or to more bellicosity with the threat of dispatching 120,000 U.S. troops to stand behind the Carrier Battle Group and the B-52 squadron already sent. Orban is persona non grata in several NATO countries. Worker revolutionists want to know why the U.S. borders are open for visits by such neo-Hitlerite scum? We object and don’t want him here at all, contrary to the idealist ultra-open borders position of certain fake Trotskyists. We want to rescue the refugees these two want dead! The Immigration and Naturalization Service 2019 quota for Syrians is 62 persons. We say that is a racist and murderous Muslim ban, perpetrated on the sly.The White House visit of this successful border wall builder was part of the racist message itself!
This racist message comes at a time when most European states are on record as opposed to Trump’s threat to Iran. European Parliament elections are about to begin, and we call upon worker revolutionists to organize labor actions to denounce Washington’s war quest and any notions in European bosses’ governments to participate in it. (This would also be high time for the RCIT to demand the withdrawal of Austrian armed forces from the former Yugoslavia.)
Among the ironies operating in the present Iran case are: 1. Trump and Rouhani understand each other and don’t want war, after threatening force, like the two mobsters they are, and 2., the international players who DO want this war and who have for years called for the U.S. to wage it are Israel and Saudi Arabia!
And Trump could use a war. He may continue to have Speaker of Congress Pelosi opposing his impeachment, but he is beginning to lose court and state laws battles where he fights to keep his finances hidden. And his demonstration of his autarchic misunderstanding of trade with China is not going to be popular, or remain so for long. The farmers who voted for him are already feeling the actual effects as commodity prices tank, while the consumers generally will feel the pain in just a few weeks, and in this season where even the Democrats (!) begin to think about impeaching him, some begin to remember that he swiped congress’ longstanding control over trade policy, telling the twin party suckers a national security emergency was caused by China’s thieving of technology!
In Trump’s circumstances, where his racist supporters care less that he has been clutching at increasing powers, are glad he’s arranging for presidential pardons for war criminals, and where he is himself a named unindicted co-conspirator, he may require a war to “wag the dog” like Clinton did successfully with a few dozen cruise missiles in 1999. Generals appear on tv warning that an Iran war would be much more like Viet Nam than Saddam’s Iraq was. We hasten here to point out that this is a greased slope we ought to recognize, having seen it a few times before back in the days of “the draft.” Trump would gladly send thousands to their deaths and not a few GI’s as well to avoid prison, a reality almost certainly waiting for him once–or is it “if”?– he leaves office in January, 2021 or before. Increasingly, a second Trump term appears to require a large scale successful Russian electronic attack on county voter rolls and other forms of vote suppression.
Trump wants to split Russia out of the SCO. He’d be glad to “let Russia deal with Syria” if he can turn Russia against Iran, and he can offer the Syria plum to Putin because they’re either pals or forced to act that way by compromising leverage Putin has. Trump got rid of the policy traditionalist General Mattis and his new Secretary of Defense Shanahan is a yes man from Boeing. Let Putin go for this horsetrading and leave the SCO and Trump will be free to attack China later. The big budgetary buildup for the Pentagon has not just been candy for the Military-Industrial Complex. Among the biggest capitalists a quick decisive war with China is a popular wish as the U.S. empire faces decline. WORKERS BEWARE! If your ruling class and their international bloc figure out how to break the SCO apart they will put you up to marching on Beijing! We call for saving the planet and all the threatened species from this cataclysm. We call for U.S. and Chinese workers to wage war on their capitalist rulers, making the socialist revolution and breaking humanity out of the loop of wars and economic collapses.
So far we think Trump is more than a little loco, and his Iran ploy is so far less than likely to work. There is the chance that this very dangerous development comes to nothing, like 2017’s “mine’s bigger than yours” nuclear button bluster against Kim & the DPRK. But that was before Bolton was National Security Advisor, and the DPRK is seen by Trump as a personal opportunity for capitalist penetration in the course of restoration, whereas Iran is an object of his hatred of Islam. You would think it would be otherwise, with the DPRK in possession of actual nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles capable of hitting allied and U.S. territory. His demurring, matched by Rouhani’s stated preference for peace is reported to have caused Bolton and Pompeo to have an angry shouting match, doubtless over who is to blame for the failure to start an Iran war!
Trump dreams of a triumphal Trump military victory parade on July 4th, but his logic for an Iran war has escaped the masses. There is no jingoism like Bush enjoyed for his Iraq invasion in 2003. Not yet. Workers, beware! He may still want to sell one to his base when he announces pardons for accused and convicted war criminals on May 27th, this year’s Memorial Day.
Trump must go, and go THIS year! The working class, in defense of human life, in defense of itself and the threatened 1 million species, needs to take his nuclear “football” away and give him the boot. And not as a single issue but as one class demand with a temporary emphasis among all the workers demands for justice and the political power, a dictatorship of the proletariat in place of the fatal dictatorship of the capitalists, to get and build and keep justice. Then, if after he is removed, the reformists, whose opposition has so far been so ineffectual, want to prosecute and jail him, we won’t fret. We will be busy fighting the other Trumps with their dreams of other paths to world domination. And we will be busy building a recovering world and closing jails, not building new ones.
Down With Sanctions!
Just as Trump’s tariffs largely punish U.S. farmers and consumers, his Iran sanctions immiserate the Iranian workers, for whom necessities become scarce with soaring prices. The regime of the Mullahs has problems of their own making besides, for which Washington is blamed. The masses tire of this dodge. They know the war in Syria is bankrupting the country, but our fake left “anti-imperialists” don’t. Right along with the Mullahs’ regime they support Assad and deny Iran’s war crimes, their forced migration of Sunnis, confiscation of the deeds to their land and homes, and even ethnic cleansing, all of which these tools loudly deny. With a clueless Russophile “opposition” like this and no mobilized antiwar movement based in the working class, Trump feels a complete freedom of action, despite wholesale miasma in the military. He knows most Democrat politicians always rally round the flag for war profits once the bloodletting is begun. We demand an end to the sanctions and an immediate withdrawal of all troops from the region and abandonment of all overseas U.S. military bases.[2]
The Iranian workers have found the costs of the war in Syria have not been offset by the proceeds remitted by the settlers, the 1 plus or possibly two million Iranians their leaders have moved into properties in Syria confiscated from the refugees— the costs have not been borne by any repatriated profits, all of which go to the Mullahs and their henchmen and this occurs while widespread class struggle breaks out across Iran itself. The religious hierarchs thought they’d head off the masses’ grievances by shipping the unemployed to Syria. Washington’s new sanctions post Trump’s withdrawal from the JCPOA aggravate the crisis of a regime bankrupted by the intervention in Syria in support of Assad and now threatened with fire and fury by the egomaniacal son of a racist landlord. We stand with the Iranian workers against war and for all of their demands. Down with Giuliani’s connivance with the capitalist MEK! Expose all imperialist secret “diplomacy!” Open the borders to rescue refugees from imperialism’s wars and counter-revolutions.
- Down with Trump This year!
- Say No to U.S. sanctions against Iran! No war with Iran!
- No to the red/brown alliance! There is no “anti-imperialist” bloc!
- For Labor Actions to stop imperialist war, oppose all foreign interventions!
- U.S. Troops form rank and file committees to build a COME HOME NOW movement!
- For enlisted service members union and election of officers!
- Free whistleblowers and expose secret diplomacy and war crimes!
[1] White nationalism today is the consequence of terminal crisis throwing the ruling class back on the most aggressive defence of imperialism, fascist defence of white nations to smash the international working class.
[2] Earlier this week, officials said military planners had outlined options that could have sent up to 10,000 military reinforcements to the region. Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan later said planners hadn’t settled on a figure.
The U.S. has about 70,000 troops across the Middle East, including at a major Navy base in Bahrain and an Air Force base and operations center in Qatar. There are about 5,200 troops in Iraq and 2,000 in Syria.
https://www.apnews.com/10044ee6ce494283ba4c2e7f86f7b650
